Yeah I agree, someone saying they don't want to talk anymore because they've already written about something stops it being a discussion and makes it into some sort of lecture but without the notes. If you're insisting on telling someone you wrote about the current topic of conversation, you can just mention it and carry on with it. Like authors who go on podcasts, they'll say "Like I wrote in chapter X, I think that..." - the conversation shouldn't be killed off. Comes off as a bit arrogant.
Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the internet told me it'll be 3 million in a year").
NFTs also annoy me because it's literally the worst part of art industry - "buying" the "rights" to a piece of art so you can turn it for more cash later on, and not as an appreciation of the work. Bored Apes might be one of the few exceptions where people are doing it for "bragging rights", which is infinitely better because you're buying it to say you own it, much closer to normal art purchases.
I thought the most annoying thing about NFTs is that you're basically buying a hyperlink to a website that you do not control.
I checked out the Doctor Who NFT thing after Team 17 was teaming up with the people behind that thing, and the domain where the NFT metadata and images are being hosted was due to expire next summer. They didn't even splurge on a five-year registration for the domain. Hopefully auto-renewals don't stop working.
I looked this up the other day and I might be wrong but it seems like in most jurisdictions even if you buy a meatspace piece of art you do not own the actual copyright on the work.
While I’m not a fan of NFTs this does somewhat weaken the proposition that any “rights” cannot be sold with NFTs because IIRC this is the status quo in meatspace art purchases too.
I'm not sure it's true that something being algorithmically generated means it's public domain. Plenty of assets for things like video games are procedurally generated, but that doesn't mean they're public domain by default.
Going by this definition of public domain, I don’t see how this could be the case:
> The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply[0]
Think of it this way. Imagine I wrote some code, and when I ran it it generated a piece of art. Surely I would have IP rights over the artwork? Otherwise you could make the same argument about art made with a somehow automatic paintbrush I built.
I hope I’m not talking at cross-purposes here and using a completely different definition of “public domain” was was intended, apologies if this is the case.
There is a difference between the concept of a computer being a "clever pencil", which you are referring to, and the computer generating weapons and gear to generate a drop from a selection of "$ELEMENT $LEVEL $WEAPON $MODIFIER" (e.g. fiery epic hammer of orc skull crushing) which is equivalent to generating all of them (not copyrightable).
Now, the individual visual components of the weapons could have a copyright but the computationally assemblaged work based on the components would not because they've just run a job to "generate all the permutations".
For something like No Man's Sky, which is extremely procedurally generated I reckon it's very grey and they could try to make a case but the actual world they generated for people to play in would not be protected by copright. I don't think it's well tested in court.
In the case of the monkeys the hat, the basemonkey, and sunglasses could have a copyright but the assembled monkeys generated by a computer with no creativity would not. But it's a derivative work of things with copyright so that aspect becomes super grey.
As you say, it seems like there’s a significant grey area that needs to be resolved, and I could see it being quite difficult to figure out where to draw the line in practice.
I am aware of the legal discussions around the hypotheticals, but has that actually been tested in court?
Define algorithmically generated? There are certainly tools for randomizing the mix of image elements that are present in a piece of art, and combining them, but does that only apply if I used a computer to do it? What if I draw 300 reference images, photocopy them, cut them out, and sit down with a set of dice and tables, and make collages using glue?
Does the inclusion of random noise as a processing step in creating digital art count as algorithmically generated?
What if I use a custom programmed brush that simulates the randomness of physical brush bristles to simulate in a digital painting?
The US Copyright Office notes that "Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.", and lists in its examples:
> A claim based on a mechanical weaving process that randomly
produces irregular shapes in the fabric without any discernible
pattern.
That is so specific that I have to believe there was a court case where someone attempted to claim copyright for that kind of process.
But to answer your question to define algorithmically generated, the requirement is that “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
Iirc cdpa 1988 in the UK holds it to be copyright of the authors of the program. But I'd be surprised if the law was a comfortable fit for practice 30 years on, or that it had been tested much in court.
Fairly clearly what you 'get' is dependent on the surrounding system. It's one for a legal-crypto startup but you can imagine selling some NFT being linked to a contract for transfer of copyright. Maybe nobody is doing this, idk, but they could. It's also irrelevant for some applications of NFTs, so it would be a design error to expect every NFT system to enforce copyright transfers.
I agree in principle I think you could (I'm not a lawyer). However, you run into the starting problem of needing a trusted authority to verify a rights holder is in fact the rights holder. Also if the right is exclusive, how is that managed, i.e. prevent them issuing the same rights to many people. All answers thus far seem to point back to a central authority, and then what's the point of it being on blockchain.
> However, you run into the starting problem of needing a trusted authority to verify a rights holder is in fact the rights holder.
Again, this is a different problem. One can imagine a service with a seignorage fee to verify such things when an NFT is minted after which that particular question is settled. The point of it being on a blockchain would then be subsequent ease of sale, transfer etc.
By service, I think you mean company, now I have to trust said company, also I need to check NFT is minted by company I trust, and that I trust the identifier of said company on the NFT. Now if it turns out the company wasn't doing a good job, what happens then, do the NFT's get revoked, by whom, what are the remedies and the compensation process?
All this gets bumped off chain fairly quickly with a hand wave whenever discussed, which quickly puts the block chain solution into question. If the NFT only works when minted and managed by trusted party, then is what we really need is data interoperability rather than blockchain. And even there, NFT's don't actually contain any on-chain or off-chain data expressing what the semantics of the NFT is.
> It's one for a legal-crypto startup but you can imagine selling some NFT being linked to a contract for transfer of copyright. Maybe nobody is doing this, idk, but they could.
What's to stop the buyer unbundling the property which is worth something (the copyright) from the pointless NFT?
That has changed recently, people in these communities believe that NFTs are only valid if verified by opensea. So you are now buying ownership as opensea is beginning the enforcement of copyright.
Opensea might be verifying the rights owner has attached their image to an NFT, but that still doesn't mean they have transferred any rights to the holder of the token. Correct me if I'm wrong I've not looked up Opensea's T&C's (have several other's).
Also whenever people talk about ownership in regards to copyright, it's a flag that they probably don't know what they are talking about.
For most of these people the NFT is the valuable part. If Twitter verifies your opensea nft and let's you put it on your Twitter profile that is the value.
Technically violations are determined by a court. If no one has accused you of a violation and no court has found you in violation then you are not in violation.
A separate question is would the copyright holder win a lawsuit or DMCA takedown request? I don't know
> Your not buying the rights, that's the most annoying thing about NFTs, that people don't get.
You are buying the rights, but they're rights that exist in a pseudo-legal system that has no enforcement and isn't recognized by any existing legal authority. Some kind of enforcement could exist one day though.
For instance, it's possible that your house in a "metaverse" might only display art for the NFTs that it verifies you own.
Buying an NFT is buying the right to the NFT. It's not buying the right to the art.
Even if NFTs were backed by law, so that if I use your private key to transfer the NFT to me you would be able to use the law to come after me for theft, what I stole from you wasn't the rights to the art.
What the grandparent post was complaining about was that it's not even the rights to the art.
If you buy the rights to the ape, then you can sell copies.
I suppose the holder of an NFT can sell a "copy NFT". Maybe that's the next thing. Selling an NFT of an NFT of an NFT of a Beatles song. With a holder chain making sure that whoever minted the NFT-of-NFT at the time did hold the parent NFT.
That last paragraph is of course exactly the kind of nonsense that is at the core of NFT, so you should expect these derivative NFTs to start becoming a product soon. If you can sell NFTs-of-art, why not NFTs-of-NFTs?
Anyone can sell copies of the Mona Lisa (because expired copyright). Anyone can make NFTs of it, too. Why would NFTs minted by the Louvre be more real?
To me, NFT is performance art. It makes you think about intangible ownership. But outside of being performance art it's worthless.
How are you going to get a picture of the Mona Lisa?
Take a photo? Your not allowed.
The people who own the Mona Lisa, prevent people from taking photos of.
They instead they take a photo of it themselves, which is a new creative work and has copyrights. Now they have controlled the market on photos of the Mona Lisa and you need to license photos of it from them.
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".
This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details.
To be pedantic, though. Just because the WMF (through its counsel, presumably) "takes a position", doesn't infer that "therefore" this piece is public domain.
It may well be, but unless the WMF created the piece, it has no standing to declare this. I may well be reading too much into things, but I know also that the WMF has taken "interesting" legal positions on art (a famous recent photo set up by a wildlife photographer where a curious primate, IIRC, wandered up to the camera and depressed the shutter).
Fair enough. And until courts have ruled, we don't actually know. WMF has vested interest in normalizing it, but on the other hand they do have lawyers so it's not a completely bonkers idea.
And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.
In order for something to be copyrightable it needs to have minimal "threshold of originality" to it. In the monkey copyright case the photo clearly had. In the photo I linked to? Much less clearly so.
The EU (because Mona Lisa) is summarized as "The test for the threshold of originality is in the European Union whether the work is the author's own intellectual creation".
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality).
One would have a hard time arguing that framing a painting perfectly in the viewfinder is "the author's own intellectual creation".
In the US it's "at least some minimal degree of creativity".
But yes, both could be circumvented by injecting the painting equivalent of "paper towns", I suppose.
But in any case any of these people could start selling copies:
But of course we could then worry about what a court would say about a "no photos, please" sign and whether it's a binding contract that signs over any copyright over photos in the place (uh, doubtful).
It's an interesting legal area, and I don't reject the idea you mentioned of de facto re-copyright as a whole. I just don't think it applies to Mona Lisa specifically, for these reasons.
But you should also remember that there's a difference between "You're not allowed" and "You are not able" to take a photo.
Unless you have a contract signing away the copyright to the photo, all the establishment can do is ask you to leave after you've already taken the photo.
And I highly doubt a checkbox ToS when you bought the ticket will be considered informed consent of reassignment of copyright.
> And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.
Sorry, you're right there - my phrasing was definitely ambiguous. Like you say, there was a lot of nuance. But Wikipedia (initially contributors, then I believe, the Foundation itself) was very aggressive from the outset with "Screw you, no copyright to be found here!" which is an "interesting" stance to take when it's not at all so clearcut.
You're right to point it out. WMF does have a point of view and that case does show that their opinion on copyrightability is not necessarily unbiased.
What I've heard is that photography of a painting is considered to be a form of reproduction and not the creation of a new work. It might be different if you were to photograph the painting from a funny angle with a shadow falling across it in an artistic way but that's not what we're talking about in the case of a typical Mona Lisa image, like the one the Wikipedia page uses.
> I truly hope we do not let technology be used to create this kind of artificial scarcity
Aren't virtual economies old news by now? Plenty of games and game networks have accomplished this with virtual goods.
The 'metaverse' stuff doesn't scare me personally (where this concept could become widespread). I don't buy for a second that it's going to be a big deal where it will be anything more than a niche glorified game lobby.
No, you are not granted copyrights on the image attached to the NFT in all cases I've looked at, spoken to the people behind them and they also agreed.
Doesn't mean this can't be done, but in each case I've looked at, granting of rights (and which specific rights do we even mean?) is not happening.
Further more there is no obligation for anyone to do anything with the image linked to the NFT your the holder of.
I heard it varies. Bored Apes for example give you the rights to the underlying photograph, I think that's why you see them pop up in ad campaigns now and again.
If everyone you've spoken to is only interested in the money, maybe you should speak with different people?
Or if this is just hyperbole, perhaps accept that Sturgeon's Law is valid even for human behavior in relation to finance and economics?
People were making unbelievably stupid decisions and came up with the most ridiculous rationalizations for "investing" in the dot-com bubble. Same thing with real estate a decade later. It is not just because a market is overheated that we should dismiss the industry entirely.
(I am not saying that those with better judgement should just go and exploit the irrationality of the masses. What I am saying is that there is no way to argue anyone into making rational decisions.)
I wonder if the VCs have fallen prey to the siren's song or if they have joined the choir?
I have a hard time believing they don't ask the questions that get to the heart of the long term viability of the projects they invest in. Yet as a tech creator, I don't see much use for the game theoretic additions for the extra complexity and waste from adding blockchain.
I've only seen one example of nfts having some kind of soul and that to do with ensuring collaborators on musical projects get a kind of transparent split of the proceeds. where the token is the music. Make a remix, then it also tracks what part of which source you used etc. Open royalties when the tracks are sold.
The 80's stock market was a pimer for this kind of culture. The era of excess led people to normalize bad behavior, enthusiastic marketing of assets, and a culture of greed at any cost. Within markets where products are essential, it creates chaos, and to the lay person, it creates a false impression that success is tangible, and that because it's backed by celebrities and corporations that it is all credible.
We're hurling towards an era of false economy, the results are likely to be harsh if we allow it to continue without being reigned in. The celebrities that back scams, as well as corps need to be held accountable because the main problem that it's growing in popularity is all of the glossy polish on the lies of phony payouts.
What I find even more frustrating is that even your average retail broker is more knowledgeable, relatively speaking, than their crypto counterpart (not that crypto’s inherent dark forest helps).
The reason NFTs annoy me is because the majority of them seem to be stolen work, yet the people who buy them seem to believe that they now have rights to the work.
This is largely because there is almost nothing you can do with crypto apart from speculate and gamble. The more I learn about stuff like defi the more I understand just how fractally useless crypto is.
You can bypass the de facto ban that VISA and Mastercard put on the existence of some websites, for example Gab or the other similar one which now I can't remember. If I recall correctly, you can currently donate money to those sites only using cryptocurrency. This is kinda important, in my opinion, because "only offensive speech is free speech" (this doesn't mean I like those sites, but I don't want the credit card companies to decide what can exist on the Internet)
You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor), that's very useful for some people. Basically crypto allows for transactions that could otherwise be blocked or easily tracked by central parties (1). It can also be used to bypass gambling laws.
For legal purchases and activities crypto is useless, regular money is much more practical.
[1] depending on which crypto and how it's used tracking is possible, so care is required (especially) when converting dollars to crypto.
> You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor)
Can you? After that huge bust a few years back, I figured that particular usage was marginal at this point. Seems like the only use for crypto is ransomware, dodging taxes or smuggling embezzled money out of your country.
Yeah, there are still plenty of drugs on the darkweb. Busting a few dealers doesn't eliminate demand, and in-person dealers don't have a "reviews" page for their products and behavior.
The idea is it's not beholden to a government (though still somewhat centralized somewhere). Crypto is helping people in Turkey store value. With current inflation and economic conditions in the US and Europe more may need it in the near future.
How can crypto be a store of value when the market price fluctuates so wildly?
Bitcoin, etc fell much more in one day recently than the Turkish lira fell over many months. And one is supposedly using Bitcoin to avoid inflation in the lira?
Ok, got it. It's not that I want to pick on you, just that we should use Tether and USDT as an example only when we are talking about scumbags who contribute to make the whole crypto community look like irresponsible frauds.
Setting times is fine, but my approach is I have a list of 4-5 things to do written the night before, and knowing how much time I have in the morning, midday and afternoon as well as the energy I still have left at different parts of the day I say whether they’re done before work, at lunch, or after work.
I’m really not sure on the distinction people are using between to-do lists and these other approaches - they all seem like to-do lists just formatted differently because people work differently.
Programming books are generally technical documentation, or close enough - of course they're boring to read. There's so much detail to programming you could spend the rest of your life reading documentation and feel like you barely scratched the surface.
The article suggests identifying the reason you want to read it. In your case, you should identify what kind of problem you're trying to solve (even if not in an actual project and just in your head, something like "how DOES a cloud server work?") and then get that specific knowledge out of the book, as deep as you want to go.
Programming books can be expensive though, so you should generally google overviews of what you're looking for before committing to a whole book.
If you're having to read the thing for work, I guess identify what the problem at work/school you're trying to solve (or what project you'd be applying it to) and regularly relate back what you're reading to what you would do with it practically.
The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has, even if parts of it don't share it. A human has a hand, the hand is part of the human, but the rest of the human is not necessarily a hand.
> The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has
I don't know how you can substantiate this. I am left-handed. My wife is right-handed. These are attributes of us as individuals. What is the handedness of the city we live in? I would reject the question outright since I don't think that traits attributed to parts of a system necessarily can be attributed to the system itself.
Syllogistic errors 101. Your ruthless logic tells us a (normal) human has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious. Ergo, the universe has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious.
I'd argue that's the worst kind of best practice, because in order to get an entire team to work on it they now have no reason other than "their manager said so". It's one thing to skim over what you know your project manager won't understand (mine doesn't understand programming at all so really they just take our word on the implementation side of things), but to try and push it to the rest of the team and just hope they remember a long list of do's and don'ts without justification other than a book said to do it is stifling their personal development.
Even worse, if one were to go off and read up on what you've told the team to do on their own behalf, find that they don't agree with it, you've now got to handle:
- a discussion that should have happened earlier
- possible backtracking of recent work to try and reverse the pattern
- OR a backlogged ticket to reverse it while the system now has multiple different patterns sitting around with no push for consistency in either direction due to lack of priority
Obviously becomes much more of an issue the larger the system is, but in general you shouldn't be following (or asking others to follow) best practices without knowing the benefits behind them versus what you're doing now.
Used to have to argue with my dev team manager about this, he was a big fan of reading about some new-ish concept that we weren't using yet and then trying to tell the team he needs to spend a couple weeks changing everything over to it. I'd be the only one trying to force him to give us a list of "pros" for it over what we currently do and he wouldn't be able to answer, then go off and half-implement it across the system without telling anyone, causing the degradation of our ability to maintain the system (since it's now less consistently written) and wasting his own time.
People need to take best practices with a pinch of salt, and actually think through whether they'll provide any benefit to them in practice for whatever software they're working on.
If he knew one of their suspects names and decided to fuck with them and throw them off the trail, yes, he would use someone else's name. Your leap to judgement of "it must be Gary" is just as much of a leap as "it might not be" - both rely on "knowing" the Zodiac's motives, which no one does, because he's not been identified.
I could have sworn there was something I read when I was young that way more than that goes extinct every year.
Is it really that big a problem? Extinction happens all the time, even before humans came around. It's just what happens when environments go through change.
